Tommy Leep

Helping startups grow

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

Welp, that happened faster than I predicted. Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet's history. https://t.co/2zX5bHdhsa

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

Congrats team @ScrunchAI on the $225M acquisition!

[Bloomberg @business]

Sitecore, the digital-experience software company, has acquired Scrunch, a customer-experience platform that helps brands improve how they appear in AI-generated search results, according to a statement reviewed by Bloomberg. https://t.co/s9zGrdLCkp

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

Town has been a game changer for my workflow. Try it out, you won’t go back.

Congrats JDG, Tony, and team Town!

[Jean-Denis Greze 💡 @jgreze]

Today, we’re launching @TownAI: the AI assistant that learns you.

We’re coming out of beta with a $55M Series A led by @ARampell at @a16z, with participation from @KirstenGreen at @forerunnervc and continued support from @firstround, @altcap, and @conviction.

Right now, getting real value from AI means prompting, configuring, building workflows, managing agents.

We think that’s backwards.

The future of AI is a companion that already knows you and how you work. Town connects across your inbox, calendar, Slack, docs, messages, and workflows to understand what you need, then starts doing the work with you.

Drafting. Scheduling. Project tracking. Follow-ups. Context gathering. Multi-step tasks. And it only acts when you say so.

All adapting to your voice, priorities, routines, and relationships over time.

Your Townie is the AI assistant you actually need.

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

@angelatytran @VersionOneVC Congrats Ange and Boris! Y’all are great partners and collaborators.

[Angela Tran @angelatytran]

🎉 Today, we're excited to share that we've closed two new funds: @VersionOneVC Fund V ($78M) and Opportunities Fund III ($30M). 🎉

More + link to blog post in thread below...

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

My biggest takeaways from @benedictevans:

1. We’re in 1997 for AI—it’s as big a deal as the internet or mobile, and only as big a deal as the internet or mobile. We’re at the stage where most stuff kind of doesn’t work yet, most of what people will build hasn’t been built, and it’s not clear how any of it will work when it does. Some people in tech have bought clusters of Mac Minis, while even among 13-to-18-year-olds, only about 15% to 20% are daily active users of AI. The companies that win may not exist yet, and the use cases that matter most are probably invisible to us today.

2. Every technology wave brings ways to ruin people’s lives, deliberately or by accident, and we need to be conscious of that without panicking. Every wave of technology—databases in the 1970s, social media in the 2010s, AI today—creates new ways to harm people. We need to be conscious of these risks, build safeguards, and hold people accountable. But we also can’t let fear of potential harms stop us from capturing the benefits. The goal is thoughtful deployment, not paralysis.

3. Things will probably be okay—but “on average” hides a lot of individual pain. We’ve been automating jobs and creating new jobs since 1800. Each time, you can see the jobs that will disappear but not the new jobs, because they don’t exist yet. We go through frictional pain, dislocation, people lose jobs, towns get hollowed out, and it all sucks. But we come through richer, and we’re not worried about crops failing anymore.

4. If you’re worried about your job, the worst thing you can do is stick your head in the sand and declare AI evil. Yes, some professions face major questions, particularly if you’re an associate or would have been thinking about becoming one. The pyramid structure of professional services may fundamentally change. What helps is submerging yourself in AI, understanding what you can do with it, how it changes things, and how you can be a great hire in this new environment. That may still not be enough, but it’s the only path forward.

5. The history of accounting shows us how automation often increases employment rather than decreasing it. Despite adding machines, punch cards, mainframes, databases, ERP systems, cloud software, spreadsheets, and PCs, the number of accountants keeps going up. This is the Jevons paradox: when you make something cheaper or easier, you don’t do the same amount of work for less money. You often do vastly more because the ROI changes.

6. Distribution is becoming a more valuable moat as software gets easier to build, which favors incumbents. As AI makes building software cheaper and faster, the market gets noisier. More products launch, more companies compete for attention, and breaking through becomes harder. This means distribution—the ability to reach customers and get them to use your product—matters more than ever.

7. Foundation AI model companies won’t have lasting pricing power, and value will likely accrue up the stack. The models don’t seem to have network effects, so there’s no winner-takes-all dynamic. If you have indefinite competition between three to six foundation model providers, and the models look like undifferentiated commodities to users, why would anyone have pricing power? The current pricing chaos—people spending $1.5 million on inference in a month—is temporary disequilibrium, like someone getting a $50,000 mobile data bill in 2010. The steady state will look different.

8. OpenAI and Anthropic are buying consultancies and PE firms. This seems counterintuitive—aren’t these the companies that should need consultants least? But the reality is that companies don’t have people sitting around waiting to reimagine all their internal workflows and figure out which could be automated with AI. That’s a project requiring five to 10 people spending months working it out, then actually implementing it across vertical and horizontal systems.

9. The fundamental question isn’t whether AI automates your job—it’s whether your profession is a "task" or a job. Some jobs are just tasks, and when you automate the task, the job disappears (i.e. elevator attendants). But in most professions, the task you think you’re being paid for isn’t actually what you’re being paid for. McKinsey doesn’t get hired to produce a 75-slide deck—they get hired to walk through your enterprise, understand the politics, talk to customers, and figure out what you actually need to do. The deck is just the artifact.

10. The anti-AI backlash is real, and a fuzzy mass of different concerns, some real and some not—much like the social media backlash. There are tangible concerns: electricity bills went up in some places, though this applies to very few locations objectively. The water consumption issue is largely false; data centers use about 0.017% of U.S. water consumption. There are real questions about jobs, though economists can’t yet find clear consensus in the data about AI’s employment impact. There’s also the culture war over AI-generated content and “AI slop.” The challenge is that all of this creates political pressure even when the underlying facts are unclear or contested.

[Suzanne Xie @suzannexie]

This is a plan for Phase 2 of the National Security Renaissance: Project Alexander. It proposes a national security asset class to accelerate the effective and efficient deployment of capital into technologies vital to the nation's security. 🇺🇸

Our Congress, Treasury Department, and private citizenry have the power today to enact critical reforms that will have an immediate and transformational impact on American innovation.

All feedback welcome! 🧵1/14

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

If you’re interested in fertility decline, it’s worth listening to the data and interpretation from economist-demographer @JesusFerna7026 https://t.co/uOpuuc2MRT

[USV @usv]

https://t.co/XO8Jdcm40d

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

@moislamvc @obviousvc Congrats Mo!

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

Congrats @AlexYancher and team @PassportGlobal1 for your $425M acquisition agreeement.

Passport was the first SPV I led on @angellist. It launched my journey as a solo investor. @AlexYancher and @Aaronschwartz35, thanks for being open to taking a check from me nine years ago.

[Alex Yancher @AlexYancher]

Today marks one of the most meaningful milestones in Passport’s journey: we’ve signed an agreement to be acquired by Global-e

Nine years ago, Passport started with a simple but ambitious vision: Help brands reach their global potential. Since then, we’ve built a proprietary global shipping network that now leads the market in transit times and customer experience, along with a full suite of solutions that supports brands at every stage from cross-border enablement to in-country operations and marketplace management. And most importantly, we earned the trust of incredible brands and 3PLs around the world.

What makes this moment special is that great companies are bought, not sold. As we continued to build for the future, Global-e approached us because they saw the value in what this team built: our logistics infrastructure, our operational depth, our customer relationships, and our approach for enabling global commerce.

This partnership is so exciting because our visions to help brands go global are deeply aligned. Together, we can help more brands expand globally, faster and more confidently, with a more complete solution than either company could offer alone.

To our customers: thank you for trusting us with your brands, your growth, and your customers around the world. Many of you took a chance on Passport early, partnered closely with us, pushed us to improve, and helped shape the company we are today.

To our partners: thank you for helping us build a truly global ecosystem. Cross-border commerce is impossible without strong operational and strategic partnerships, and we would not be here without you.

To our investors: thank you for believing in Passport’s vision from the beginning and for supporting us through every stage of growth. Your partnership, guidance, and conviction helped us build a company capable of redefining what global commerce can look like for modern brands. 

And to the Passport team: thank you. This moment belongs to all of you. Thank you for the late nights, the ownership, the resilience, the creativity, and the belief in what we were building especially during the hard moments. What this team accomplished over the last 9 years is extraordinary, and this acquisition is a direct reflection of that work.

I couldn’t be more proud of what we’ve built together.

And the best part is we’re just getting started.

Press Release here:

https://t.co/rgtNENWSgz

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

Gonna use "metabolize the innovation"

[joshpuckett @joshpuckett]

I love how Jony and Flavio predicted the precise, immediate response we're seeing to the Luce.

It's almost like they're good designers who know a thing or two about design!

Clip from @cleoabram's interview, a must watch.

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

@AlexYancher Congrats Alex and team Passport!

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

@BaijuBhatt @vladtenev Legends

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

@Bencera Nice one Ben 👊🏻

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

Wild times

[Ben Cera @Bencera]

Polsia just raised $30M at a $250M valuation.

Approaching $10M annual run rate.

One Founder + AI. Zero employees.

Polsia runs companies autonomously.

It also ran its own fundraising.

I just showed up for signatures.

[Bill Clerico @billclerico]

The world is getting warmer while our infrastructure gets older: a recipe for disasters.

We’re excited to announce Fund II: $85M for early stage investments in disaster resilience.

[Tommy Leep @leepnet]

“In a world in which automation will collapse the cost of everything to basically zero, the only question that matters is what do you actually want. What do you consume. What do you put in your body. What you put in your heart.”

[Will Manidis @WillManidis]

https://t.co/aHOHtb1rcW

[Ankur Nagpal @ankurnagpal]

New USVC Investment:

We just invested $5M in the @mercury Series D with a16z, Sequoia Capital, TCV, CRV and others

This investment was directly on the cap table with no underlying fees or carry

Here's why we are so bullish on @immad and team: